How to Get Rich (by getting lucky)
The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur
January 7, 2022
Read time: 10 minutes
Here’s the truth of how I got rich:
I got lucky.
Really lucky.
But ya want to know the craziest part?
It was lucky by design.
In this article, I’m gonna show you how to do the same by unpacking one of the most important concepts for anybody aspiring to greatness: Luck.
Greatness is always the result of luck.
Problem is, most of us think of Luck as something that just happens randomly and entirely outside of our direct control and so we give up before even trying to get lucky.
But notice two words, in particular… direct control.
The first thing you have to understand about Luck is this:
Our goal is not to control Luck (that’s impossible).
Our goal is simply to massage the probabilities ever so slightly in our favor so that over a long enough time-horizon our odds of success converge on a 100% likelihood.
Today, we’re going to learn:
- The 4 Types of Luck
- How to Become a Luck Magnet
- A Simple Blueprint for Getting Rich (By Getting Lucky)
The 4 Types of Luck
The average person won’t admit the majority of their success in life was the result of really good luck.
Well, if you want to be great, you cannot do what the average person does. You must develop a different sort of relationship with Luck
One where you clearly understand the 4 types of Luck and the role they play in your life.
These are based on the excellent book, Chase, Chance, and Creativity by Dr. James Austin.
1. Blind Luck
This is the completely random, out-of-the-blue luck that can’t be controlled or even manipulated.
It’s being born with all your limbs and mental faculties.
Or being raised in an upper-middle-class family in the suburbs of Ohio in 2023 with access to the internet, modern medicine, and economic abundance.
Ya can’t do much with this type of luck. It’s either gonna happen or it’s not.
Not much we can do with this one, so let’s move onto the second form of luck.
2. Hustle Luck
This is my favorite type of luck.
It’s born from moving through the world in a cyclone of energy, kicking up dust, and seeing what sticks.
Simply put, you’re just out there doing a bunch of stuff.
I like to imagine a mad-scientist pouring all sorts of chemicals into a pot and stirring like…ya know…a mad-man, to see what rises from the smoke.
Motion is the key to success here.
Here’s the most interesting thing:
That motion doesn’t even have to be intelligent or intentional to put you in the path of incredible good fortune.
All we’re doing here is stacking the deck more-and-more in our favor, trying to eek out a few percentage points on the probability curve of success.
Want to improve your Hustle Luck?
Well, there’s ONE trait in particular you’ve got to develop, but I’ll talk about that in just a bit.
First, let’s unpack the third form of luck.
3. Preparation Luck
If you’re not careful you could easily mistake this with Blind Luck.
This type of luck stems from your unique knowledge, experiences, resources, outlooks, relationships, and perspectives.
Preparation Luck typically appears inside a very narrow window of opportunity.
Your ability to recognize the opportunity is EVERYTHING.
This is the type of luck Louis Pasteur had in mind when he said:
“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
To optimize for Preparation Luck you’re going to need TWO traits… but again, let’s put a pin in that and discuss our fourth and final type of luck.
4. Unique Character Luck
Our fourth and final type of luck is hard to notice, because it typically seems to appear as the consequence of a logical series of events.
This gives the impression that, “But of course… it could never have occurred otherwise.”
Benjamin Disraeli said it best: “We make our fortunes and call them fate.”
Another word for this type of luck is Destiny.
Now, Destiny is a powerful word. It conjures images of inevitability, which seems about as far from “luck” as one can possibly get, right?
Well, yes and no.
See, the real problem with luck is that our squishy human brains didn’t evolve to accurately calculate probabilities.
As a result, we’re actually quite bad at judging the likelihood of an event (even when that event has a small, fixed number of outcomes… like the chances of rolling a dice and hitting 6 three times in a row).
So, if we suck at calculating the likelihood of simple events, just imagine how terrible we are when dealing with the complexity of life which has an infinite number of potential outcomes.
Here’s the most common miscalculation humans make when considering luck:
Just because an event DID occur, we tend to think it was likely to occur.
This happens because our brains are dot-connecting machines. In hindsight, we can literally connect any two dots to create a nice cohesive narrative (even if those dots, in reality, had nothing to do with one another).
Our brains love nice cohesive narratives, reality be damned.
Okay, so let’s bring this back around to Unique Character Luck, because in my experience, this is the hardest one to really understand.
Unique Character Luck is the result of your uniqueness.
Simply put: The combination of your weird hobbies, eccentric worldview, strange opinions, and random skills makes you a unique, irreplaceable butterfly.
Introducing the Butterfly Effect
This is where Chaos Theory (or The Butterfly Effect) comes in.
Ya ever heard of how a butterfly flaps its wings in New York and it causes a tsunami in Japan?
Yeah, it doesn’t exactly happen like that, but the theory is important for our purpose because the universe is truly an interconnected matrix of nodes all influencing one another in an infinite number of cascading consequences.
Here’s what that means for Unique Character Luck:
An event could occur on the other side of the globe which triggers a series of interactions that leads deterministically back to you as a result of your uniqueness in the world.
Let’s simplify that:
Some guy is out scuba diving on vacation off the coast of Thailand when he discovers a sunken ship.
He asks the locals and learns that this might be some fabled lost-ship which disappeared hundreds of years ago loaded with treasure… But they also tell him it’s far too dangerous.
Countless adventurers have died attempting to recover the treasure.
Undeterred, our intrepid adventurer turns to the Google-machine to find the best deep sea diver in the world.
Lo and behold, what does he find?
You and your YouTube channel where you share stories about your adventurous dives to an audience of 3M people!
(Okay, for the sake of this story, you’re a deep-sea diver enthusiast with a mega-YouTube Channel.)
Now THIS guys Blind Luck has become YOUR Unique Character Luck.
On the surface, it looks like you also benefited from Blind Luck, but that would miss the broader context, which is that your unique skills have increased your Surface Area of Luck.
Here’s the Surface Area of Luck Formula:
Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling
Now, what are the chances YOU (our YouTube Enthusiast) is actually the best deep sea diver in the world?
Doesn’t matter.
Scuba-Boy found YOU, because not only were you passionate about the thing, but you’d been making your passions known to the world, which means his luck is now YOUR luck.
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How to Attract Luck
Alright,so now that we understand the four flavors of Luck, here’s how to actually increase your likelihood of getting Lady Luck to look your way.
1. Optimize for the Maximum Number of Swings At Bat
Remember, Hustle Luck is the result of just doing more.
Your ability to do more is dependent on two things:
Duration and Iteration.
Duration = How long you do the thing.
Iteration = How many times you do the thing.
One important variable to consider here is SPEED.
If you can increase the speed with which you do things, you can VASTLY improve the number of iterations you can complete.
I break this down in more detail in this video:
2. Curiosity Is A Better Indicator of Success Than Intelligence
In my experience hiring hundreds of employees over the years, I’ve noticed that all the rockstars who inevitably climb to the top of my companies share a distinctive trait:
It’s not Intelligence, or Hard Work, or Consistency…
It’s Curiosity.
These individuals are always asking why and probing for deeper understanding of the world around them.
Curiosity is powerful because when combined with the next thing I’m going to share with you, it VASTLY improves your likelihood of experiencing Preparation Luck.
3. Creativity is a Luck Super-Magnet
Nothing attracts Luck quite like Creativity.
And no, I’m not talking about artistic creativity like the ability to paint, draw, sing, or write.
I define Creativity as the ability to synthesize knowledge in new and unique ways.
The people who are able to take seemingly unconnected pieces of information and combine them in novel, yet functional ways have a mighty advantage in the game of Luck.
Combine Curiosity (filling the information tank) with Creativity (utilizing that information tank) and you have an unstoppable engine for generating Luck seemingly on demand..
4. Be Weirdly You
This is simple:
You cannot benefit from Unique Character Luck if you are just like everybody else.
The irony is most of us spent the first twenty years of our lives (if not even more), just trying to fit in. We were told this was the road to success, when in reality, it’s the road to commoditization.
To cultivate Unique Character Luck you must develop your own unique thoughts and perspectives and skills and hobbies and…
Put in another way:
You must become Uniquely You.
(Youniquely: A cool potential brand name, by the way)
So go on, let your freak flag fly.
A Simple Blueprint for Getting Rich (by getting lucky)
This is a simple formula for increasing your Surface Area of Luck, and it stems from the 3 Daily Habits That Made Me A Millionaire.
Here’s a video breaking it down:
But in short, here’s the 3 things you need to do every single day to increase your exposure to luck:
1. Learn
We spoke earlier about the importance of Curiosity if you want to get ahead in the workforce. The best way I know how to develop curiosity is to pick a subject and just try to learn as much about it as you possibly can.
The more you learn, the more interesting the topic becomes because you start to see all the interconnected pieces for how complex they truly are.
Make a daily habit of learning for at least 30 minutes a day. That could be reading a book, watching an educational YouTube video, or listening to a podcast.
2. Think
If you don’t know what you think on a topic, chances are you’ll simply default to what others tell you.
It should go without saying, but copying the opinions of others is not a great way of differentiating yourself, because remember:
Luck loves originality.
So make time each day for thinking.
Writing for an hour a day is my preferred method, but you could meditate, go for a silent walk, or take a long hot shower.
I don’t care how you do it, just make sure you’re getting into the mental gym every single day.
3. Do
At some point we’ve got to put rubber on the road and start taking action.
This is the easiest and most accessible way of quickly putting yourself on a collision course with luck, especially when you’re first starting out and you have little experience, skills, resources, or network to leverage.
Prioritize spending at least 3 hours a day doing.
This can take many forms including:
- Creating a product
- Designing a landing page
- Scripting a YouTube Video
- Writing an email newsletter
- Calling prospective customers
Here’s an article with more specific actions you should take in growing your money tree.
In the meantime,
Stay Hyperfocused, My Friends.
AV
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- These 6 Skills Will Make You Millions
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